Sanja Bahun-Radunovic When the Margin Cries: Surrealism in Yugoslavia HE CURRENT GEOPOLITICAL REDEFINING of the notions of the center and the margin accelerated rediscovery of “minor” Tcultures. The study of their import and influences, however, remains largely focused upon the post-Second World War period. Yet, it was precisely modernist apprehensiveness of fixed structures that initiated a subversion of these geo-cultural categories. Nowhere was the urge to restructure geopolitical hierarchies felt more powerfully than in the avant-garde. The geographic effect of this principle was an emphatic internationalization of the avant-garde activity and the establishment of multifaceted relations between the avant-garde “centers” (Paris, Berlin, New York, Moscow) and their counterparts in the cultural “periphery” (Buenos Aires, Athens, Bucharest, Cairo). These unique cross-cultural dialogues fermented in surrealism. Even though Paris served as an indisputable (if self-assigned) center, this site of desire was, quite “surrealistically”, infused and indeed formed by the periphery. We have discovered many loci of the “centripetal” surrealist forces and the literature on, for instance, Brazilian, German, or even Egyptian surrealism abounds. Yet, one surrealist grouping seems to have escaped the record: apart form a brief mentioning in several most comprehensive books, the Yugoslav surrealists have hardly received any critical attention outside their own country1. At the same time, the Belgrade 1 Maurice Nadeau’s classical Histoire du surréalisme suivie de documents surréalistes (Nadeau 1945) mentions the Belgrade Circle only parenthetically. Gérard Durozoi’s Le surréalisme (2002), even though criticizing Nadeau’s book for failing to account for the global spread of the movement, does not escort much more attention to the Serbian BAHUN-RADUNOVIC Sanja, «When the Margin Cries: Surrealism in Yugoslavia», RiLUnE, n. 3, 2005, p. 37-52. Sanja Bahun-Radunovic Surrealist Circle was arguably one of the most vibrant early-surrealist strongholds in Europe. Active from 1922-1932, the surrealist movement in Yugoslavia yielded a generation of excellent poets, numerous collective and individual art-works/artifacts (le cadavre exquis, collages, assemblages, and photographs), unusual theoretical works, and the post/high-surrealist art (cf. Milena Pavlović-Barili and Stane Kregar). The critical neglect may be explained by factors such as linguistic barriers, scant interpretative body, and the belated and frequently romanticized assessment of the Central- and East-European avant- garde in general. One important reason why the Belgrade group has remained virtually unknown in the international context lies in the premature termination of its activities. Forced by internal disputes and governmental repression, surrealism in Yugoslavia ceased to exist in the surrealists. René Passeron’s Encyclopédie du Surréalisme (1975) lists some of Belgrade surrealists but unfortunately provides some factual mistakes regarding their artistic contributions. The critical assessment of Serbian Surrealism in the Anglophone world is almost non-existent, the only exception being the insightful, if brief, account of the Belgrade surrealists’ artistic achievements in the two recently published accompaniments of the Central European Avant-garde exhibition by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curated by Timothy Benson: Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930 (2002) and Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-gardes, 1910-1930 ( 2002). The French-speaking audience is in a slightly better position – it may get acquainted with the activities of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle in three hard-to-find books, Hanifa Kapidžić-Osmanagić, Le Surréalisme serbe et ses rapports avec le surréalisme français (1968), Dušan Matić, André Breton oblique (1977), Branko Aleksić, Dalí: Inédits de Belgrade (1932) (1987) and «Le Sphynx de l’humour noir soumis à la question à Belgrade en 1932» (1988). Marko Ristić and Dušan Matić recorded their memories of Breton in: Marko Ristić, «La nuit du tournesol» and Dušan Matić, «Un chef d’orchestre» (1967). An entry on Serbian Surrealism in German and respective entries on Dušan Matić and Marko Ristić (all authored by Branko Aleksić) have appeared in: Europa, Europa, Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa, band. 1-4, eds. Ryszard Stanislawski and Christoph Brockhaus (1994). There is, however, a whole plethora of publications on Serbian surrealism in the countries of former Yugoslavia. Of these, I would like to single out Milenka Todić’s Nemoguće (“The Impossible”) (2002) which was fortunately published as a trilingual edition. Other important critical assessments exist only Serbo- Croatian: Radovan Vučković’s Srpska avangardna proza (“Serbian Avant-garde Prose”) (2000), Jelena Novaković’s comparative study of the Serbian and French surrealism Na rubu halucinacija (“On the Edge of Hallucinations”) (1996), Jovan Delić’s Srpski nadrealizam i roman (“Serbian Surrealism and the Novel”) (1980), Miodrag B. Protić’s report on the Yugoslav surrealist art «Srpski nadrealizam, 1929- 1932» (“Serbian Surrealism, 1929-1932”) in Nadrealizam, socijalna umetnost, 1929-1950 (“Surrealism, a Social Art, 1929-1950”) (1969), and so on. The recently published collection of texts and documents by and about the Belgrade surrealists (Marko Ristić, Oko nadrealizma I [“Around Surrealism I”], 2003) presents an invaluable resource for future researchers. 38 When the Margin Cries: Surrealism in Yugoslavia form of collective action already at the beginning of 1933. Despite the fact that the individual work of several Belgrade surrealists continued until 1938, the early dissipation made impossible any presentation of the group at the subsequent surrealist exhibitions. The Belgrade surrealists’ early and original «pursuit of the marvelous» and their intense collaboration with the Paris center call for a comprehensive research which this essay can only partly embody. The following account does not aim to be exhaustive; rather, it delineates the Circle’s prolific collective activities and its relationship with the Paris in several strokes, drawing the report which – the author hopes – may incite further international research. Yet, while calling the critical attention to this neglected branch of the most cosmopolitan avant-garde movement, the ambitions of this essay grow large: to unearth what may prove to be one of the best kept secrets of surrealism means to bring about not only the reframing of surrealism as we know it, but also the re-apprehension of the modernist avant-garde in general. The corollary reframing of the dynamic of the center and the margin is as much needed in the present day geopolitical space as it was (and felt so) in the years of the surrealist uproar. In spite of its provocative nature, surrealism in France developed as a more or less foreseeable expression of the evolution of French literature hitherto, in particular in its post-Lautréamont period. By contrast, in then young political entity of the South Slavs, surrealism appeared as a movement severed from the area’s natural literary development. Almost accustomed to their lagging behind the artistic trends, the Yugoslav cultures lacked an interior refractive point against and through which it an avant-garde movement may be developed2. Serbian Surrealism was also curiously unanchored in DADA-activities of the only preceding avant-garde grouping in the region, the zenitists3. The localization of activity to the southeastern parts of the country was another particularity of Yugoslav surrealism. As remarked by Vučković and Kapidžić-Osmanagić, this «surrealist siting» may be explained 2 In their Anti-Wall manifesto the surrealists Vane Bor and Marko Ristić emphasize the idiosyncrasy of the South Slavic literary space, claiming that surrealism as expression of the crisis of poetry could not have evolved naturally from domestic literature, for «that literature itself had not had autochthonous development» (Bor and Ristić 1932: p. 26). 3 The Belgrade Surrealists showed very little understanding for the endeavors of «zenitists», the Yugoslav dadaists rallied around the magazine Zenit, published in Zagreb. In his assessment of the origins of Serbian Surrealism, Vučković explains the movement’s independence from the domestic DADA project by the dynamic of foreign influences (Vučković 2000: p. 218-219). 39 Sanja Bahun-Radunovic convincingly by the dynamic of foreign influences. These had caused profound cultural variances in this ethnically compact region and importantly fashioned its modernist awakening: whereas the impact of the long and intimate contact with German culture was felt in the northwestern parts of the region (expressionism and dadaism in Slovenia and Croatia), the strong cultural and diplomatic links between France and Serbia in the nineteenth century made French art and philosophy a shaping force of the Serbian intellectual scene. Thus, it may be considered natural that a French movement would influence the young Serbian intelligentsia. Yet, the choice of the movement to disquiet what was just articulating itself as a new political entity (the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia) was, one may argue, a matter of (un)conscious preference and specific historical constellation. In other words, the moment and the place were ripe for surrealism. More than any other avant-garde movement, surrealism installed a vigorous crossing of boundaries